Screenshot taken from http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/stories/scaling-agile-across-the-enterprise/

At the TechEd North America 2014 yesterday many new products and features have been released or announced.

But besides real, delivered software and "early previews" Microsoft also let us see behind their company facade and announced their "Engineering Stories" where you get deep insights in their processes and ways of working. And you might have wondered, how Microsoft was able to change their release cycles in the last years down from 3 years to 3 Weeks to support business needs - this is already the first story: "Scaling Agile to the Enterprise".

I hope to see more interesting stories - Microsoft definitively has the size, complexity to let us look behind the scenes a bit ;)

In the context of the .NET User Group Austria Christian Nagel held a nice presentation about the news from the //build/ 2014. It was a very subjective listing and on purpose he did not try to be very objective with his selection. Which would not be possible given the 1.5h time frame ;)

1. Internet of Things

Since the forecasts of the number of devices connected to the internet increase every month its clear that Microsoft also is not missing this train and presented numerous efforts in this area: Windows Embedded compact 2013, Windows Embedded and the .NET micro framework.

2. Best session: "IT'S A TRAP - 3 Remarkably Common UI Traps and How to Avoid Them in Your Designs"

For Christian, the best session of the whole //build was the "Its a trap!" session of Steve Herbst and Michael Medlock. View this session - its highly recommended.

3. .NET 4.5.1

Although some of the participants were developing with .NET 4.5.1 already, Christian presented the new features of 4.5.1 like 64-bit edit and continue, method return value inspection, async debugging enhancements, ASP.NET application suspension, multicore JIT improvements, on-demand large heap compaction and many more. For an in-depth session I recommend watching "The Next Generation of .NET for Building Applications" by Habib Heydarian.

4. "Roslyn"

With Roslyn, Microsoft did a complete rewrite of the c# and the VB compiler and exposing them as rich APIs for everyone to use. This enables every developer for a better development experience, VS extensions are easier to write now and since its a complete new architecture its easier to extend and maintain for Microsoft. Also, its fully open source now! The session "The future of C#" highlights in depth knowledge about Roslyn.

5. C# language features - vnext

At the end we got a glimpse of how the next version of C# will look like. Microsoft and the community had a lot of ideas how the language can be improved. But many of them were complicated to develop in the old compiler. So with Roslyn, Microsoft is now in the position to realise them. Here you can see the status of all these improvements.

Just to tease you a bit:

Primary constructors

Auto-property initializers

Getter-only auto-properties

Dictionary initializers

Await in catch/finally

Null propagation

6. Wrap up

Eventhough I am not liking some of the new C# language features - or it might be that I don't fully understand them? ;) - it was good to hear from Christian his own impressions and what he found noteworthy from the //build. Max Knor, who also listened to the presentation, recommended his own topics from the //build/ while he helped us killing the provided Pizza after the presentation ;)